Books like How Sweet the Sound
By Kwame Alexander
For families who want music playing while they read, this book turns picture-book time into a listening party spanning generations. Rhythmic, celebratory, reverent, alive with sound and color.
A quiet, piano-loving boy — the son of a man once enslaved — grows up to compose music so joyful and rhythmic it earns him a new name: the King of Ragtime.
A picture-book biography of a boy in New York City who sees art everywhere — in poetry, in museums, in games, in the sound of words — and grows up to become a groundbreaking painter.
A boy who longs to be a trumpeter can only play an imaginary horn, until a musician from the neighborhood night club notices his ambition and takes him seriously.
A cheerful taxi driver named Dan cruises through town picking up a band member by member, each new passenger adding fresh sounds and colors to the growing crowd inside his cab.
A young painter defies a male-dominated art world by pouring paint straight onto canvas and pushing it with mops and squeegees, inventing a whole new way to make pictures.
Three young rebels find each other while playing outside, and when a local lagoon dries up and traps a bird friend, they call on their ancestors to help.
A young left-handed girl picks up her brother's guitar, flips it upside down to play it her own way, and by age eleven has written "Freight Train," a song the world would come to know.
A young Japanese American artist grows up determined to draw, even as her family is sent to a WWII internment camp — and she goes on to create groundbreaking picture books that show children of every race together.
A true story about a young inventor who builds his own microphone from a broomstick, a cinderblock, and a telephone, then goes on to engineer the world's first solid-body electric guitar.
A musical girl from small-town North Carolina, born Eunice Kathleen Waymon, grows into the singer Nina Simone — her sweet voice rising into a thunderous roar of protest during the Civil Rights Movement.
A biography of jazz pioneer Duke Ellington, tracing his rise from playing pool halls and cabarets as a teenager to leading his orchestra through a groundbreaking Carnegie Hall performance of Black, Brown, and Beige.
